guns

Mere weeks after the Guitar Hero series finally made its way onto the iPhone, UltimateGuitar.com has a fresh competitor for the popular rhythm game. The guitar enthusiast Web site just launched Slash Arcade Rocker, and as the name suggests, the game requires a love for Slash and his music.

As a fan of pretty much any rhythm game on any in-house video game system, I jumped at the chance to try out Slash Arcade Rocker slightly ahead of schedule. Although I haven't had any hands-on time with Guitar Hero for the iPhone, I can say based on the … Read more

A certain E3 Expo has swept in to steal the spotlight everywhere, so, of course, we spend the episode breaking down the aftermath of Microsoft's news conference, including an impressive surprise from ESPN. Is the Kinect worth it? Will Nintendo's 3DS be any good? And why are there so many damn shooters? Our guest, gaming/tech expert, E3 veteran, and former Playboy editor Scott Alexander, joins us for some grumpy and impassioned talk.

Next week, Dan will be back from his E3 adventures, hands full of strange pictures and stranger stories. Until then, enjoy the show!

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Heavy Gunner 3D is a satisfying if repetitive sci-fi-themed arcade shooter with short, fast-paced levels and an RPG-style system for buying and upgrading weaponry.

Heavy Gunner 3D's most striking feature is its 3D-ness: from your fixed first-person perspective, you look down the barrels of your two guns (one on the left, one on the right, controlled with touch-screen thumb-joysticks), but you can tilt left or right to rotate your view 360 degrees, and you can tilt forward and back to look up and down. This makes for physically involving gameplay, as you rack up kills and chains on large … Read more

Sniper Strike is a first-person arcade game that manages to drain much of the fun out of a time-honored video-game pursuit: shooting bad guys in the head.

This game's main problem is its clunky interface. You see a small portion of the playfield through your rifle's scope, and you touch and drag to move the terrain around--which varies over the game's two built-in maps, a village and a city. When a target moves into the center of your screen, a small reticle appears over it, and then you tap a touch-screen fire button to shoot. The animations … Read more

Air Assault is a relatively unremarkable arcade game in which you fight "invading Russian/Afghanistan forces" in Afghanistan with "Anti-Air and Mortal" (presumably "mortar") guns.

Every game begins with a slowly scrolling text introduction set to "Flight of the Valkyries," which you can thankfully skip. It outlines a muddled, quasi-historical backdrop with dubious references to "September 11" and Operation Enduring Freedom (which isn't helped by later appearances of apparent suicide bombers and oil-production fields, something that Afghanistan is not particularly known for). The game's wide-screen interface has you … Read more

Have you noticed how many times bullets miss their mark in the movies?

If you need to shoot a bank robber, Sean Bean, John Malkovich, or even an ugly looking two-dimensional chap on a distant target, it seems as if it's very much a hit-or-miss affair.

This, believes professor Timothy Kraft of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, is because no one has re-thought the basic principles of a pistol sight for a hundred years.

Kraft, who happens to rather enjoy shooting and is good at it, dedicated some of his finest mental armory to solving the problem. As he describes it on the university's site, … Read more

Coast Defense Free is a fun, no-cost preview of Coast Defense, a straightforward arcade wargame with some similarities to castle-defense-type games. Your objective in Coast Defense is simple: gun down waves of enemies as they advance on your bunker, from infantry (with bazookas or rifles) to tanks and troop transport trucks. The interface has you looking out from your foxhole, with enemies charging from left to right across a beach--and you can tilt your device right or left to scan the entire beach (close to twice the width of your screen). You aim with your left thumb, with a touchscreen … Read more

The Italian army has ordered 81 Hitrole Light remote-controlled weapon stations for its Iveco Lince vehicles in response to increased attacks in Afghanistan employing improvised explosive devices, according to a statement last month from Italian Ministero della Difesa, or ministry of defense.

Italy has struggled to live up to its NATO commitments in the face of widespread domestic opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and it has gone to great lengths to keep casualties to an absolute minimum. One way to do that is to stay buttoned-up.

The Hitrole is an electrically powered machine gun turret, operated by a single … Read more

Star Defense is a noteworthy addition to the crowded field of tower-defense games on the iPhone and iPod Touch. In addition to tight game design and lavish effects (both audio and visual), Star Defense introduces a substantial twist to the genre: a 3D space environment, in which you fight the insectoid S'rath on small planets that you can quickly twist, rotate, and zoom in and out on.

Waves of S'rath march toward your fragile colonist base on a set path through trenches on the game's seven different planets. You can choose between five different types of defense … Read more